From the Renaissance to the present day there has been a gradual lengthening of the span of the process of education. Medieval lay education was completed at a young age, but formal learning had since been stretched into the late teens and early twenties. In our own time, there is a significant movement to prolong education throughout adulthood by means of the development of continuing education programs. Though the degree of organization, the scope, and the effectiveness of these programs make them unique, they are hardly a new phenomenon. Nineteenth century England furnishes many well-known examples of experiments in adult education, and as early as the eighteenth century one can see the first real pressures toward it. A survey of the career of Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière will illustrate the development of programs for continuing education in France during the Enlightenment.

Nations, in the course of their history, are confronted at certain intervals with totally new ideas and alternatives. The two or three decades preceding 1900, especially the decade of the nineties, was such a time for the United States and provided a provocative and challenging inception for the twentieth century.

Historically, the two-year junior college in the United States was a by-product of the campaign waged by a number of German-trained university administrators to remove the first two years of undergraduate instruction from the university curriculum. Because of the lack of a graduate program at American colleges, students in search of the Ph.D. gravitated during the nineteenth century toward German universities, where they were more welcome than in England. In Germany, these young American scholars learned that students did not enter the university until they had completed the equivalent of fourteen years in preparatory schools. As a consequence, the German university was devoted primarily to professional training and research.

A century has passed since the Civil War, which had as one of its main emotional causes the problem of human bondage. Like John Brown's spirit, its ghost still marches with us as we painfully attempt to solve the problem of race relations. Because the geography textbooks that were printed before the war contained considerable history and government, as well as geography, they exercised a mighty force on the thinking of their youthful readers at a time when books were by no means as plentiful as they are today, and there was no competition from television. Through them we can trace the strengthening or weakening of positive attitudes toward the greatest social evil in the history of mankind.

In an interesting essay on religion and the American schools Robert Coughlan has made the observation that the rise of the nonsectarian public schools prepared the way for the development of a “vast, new, and profoundly sectarian school system—the parochial schools of American Catholics.” This movement was a consequence of the large immigration of Catholics, the prohibition of public support of sectarian schools in state constitutions, and the vigorous efforts of the Catholic hierarchy after the 1884 decree, which motivated the building of parochial schools.